This is currently more of an exploration of connecting nshrine to other services, but I imagine that I will develop this into something more useful. Perhaps it could replace the old commonwheal from the oracula. It just needs an output account for people to follow.

It’s now possible to access shrines by using the shrine’s name as a subdomain, so that the Hope shrine can be accessed via http://hope.nshrine.com/. This will be more important as we go forward in offering different ways of publicizing and linking to your shrines.

February 17, 2008

nshrine.com moved to a small slice at slicehost. Things went remarkably smoothly and performance is noticably faster. I still ahven’t decided what the added flexibility will mean, but for now, I can be certain that mail integration is a distinct possiblity.

Another plus, the icon and other images used within shrines will be on a separate virtual server. This will allow moving it to another machine, or at least a featureless server when the time comes.

This blog will remain on dreamhost for the year, probably. At some point it will move into the slice with the rest.

Since nshrine is now ready to take on new shrines and memorials, I’ve shut down new accounts and new shrines on oracula. I did it near the end of the work day, so I didn’t give it much thought. I should have. PEople have been making shrines on the oracula for over ten years. Today was a big deal.

February 11, 2008

Tonight I’ve decided to take nshrine.com out of beta. It’s not the big deal I thought it would be. There are still a ton of improvements and features to add, but I imagine that will always be true.

Also, fixed a problem with my application of the farbtastic color wheel in the shrine editing mode. I’ll get it initializing with the right color eventually, but at least for now, the ‘Apply’ and ‘Save’ work in a way that one would expect.

Also, I’ve been imagining how I might use pibb to offer some new features.

February 10, 2008

Along with applying more and more improvements inspired by recent feedback, I’ve been enabling IE6 for all functionality.Â Previously, I’ve been disabling nearly all javascript and ajax functionality in IE6 because it was rather odd.

Fortunately, in getting IE6 to work, I’ve improved the code
base in general.Â Even the stupidest looking challenges can be surprising opportunities, I suppose.

It’s beginning to look like a mid-February 1.0 launch will be more than likely.

February 3, 2008

nshrine.com has been hosted on dreamhost during this early stage of development. Several times it has become paralysed by others’ use of the shared host, which is certainly acceptable for the price. This, however, won’t work for nshrine’s near future.

I’ve considered dreamhostps as a smooth transition. It has the added benefit of being “managed”, insofar as they’ll keep the software end maintained for me. Still, this is a new program for dreamhost, and I haven’t liked very much how they’ve handled the bumps of growth in the past. Add to this the fact that the price is high for this stage, and I keep looking.

Though I want to give EC2 a shot, and probably will at some point. I doubt that the overhead of maintaining instance(s) ( plus whatever else may go with a beta service) is something I can handle at this point.

Fortunately slicehost is no longer invite-only, and comes highly-recommended. They have a low-cost entry point and a great record. Though it’ll be an added drag to maintain a webserver, mysql server, and (possibly) mail server on a site built to run on vanilla installs, there’re just too many benefits to this approach. This will, of course, get me out of the vanilla constraints, as well.